The Rhythm Method

"Sounds good," she replied with a smile.

As they reached the main floor, Ralph turned to Charlotte. "We don't officially switch places until the afternoon. Why don't you drive us to lunch?"

"Oh. Sure. Let me just go upstairs and get my keys," said Charlotte as she started up the next flight of stairs.

Ralph breathed a sigh of relief, feeling as if he had dodged a bullet. There was no way he wanted to have her join him in that filthy wreck that he rode around in. She thought little enough of him as it was. He didn't need to add to that. A minute later, Charlotte was back down the stairs, leading him to her car in the parking lot. Ralph walked a few feet behind her, admiring her shapely little ass as she walked. Charlotte caught a glimpse of him watching her as she glanced over her shoulder, and she blushed and broke into a little smile. She nearly giggled, picturing her being Faye Wray to his King Kong.

Charlotte unlocked the doors with her key fob, and the two of them got into the car. She drove a mid-sized Ford Fusion which felt quite roomy to her. However, Ralph seemed to consume the empty space in the car, making her feel as if he were nearly on top of her. Suddenly feeling quite nervous, she started to drive. It struck her that her nervousness was no longer a fear of him. Not exactly, anyway. His presence was instead giving her butterflies in her tummy. Recalling her early morning dream, she wondered what it would really be like to be kissed and manhandled by the beast. Blushing yet again, she maneuvered the car into a parking spot and opened her door and got out.

They walked into the busy restaurant and got in line. There was a menu board written in chalk behind the ordering counter, and Charlotte stood looking at it, trying to decide what she might want.

"I'm not sure what I want to get," she said to Ralph.

"You're getting the pulled pork," he replied as he walked up to the counter.

"Can I help y'all?" the counter person asked.

"I want two of the pulled pork sandwiches, two sides of fried pickle chips and baked beans, and two medium sweet teas."

"That will be sixteen eighty-two, sir."

Ralph handed the clerk a twenty, waving Charlotte away as she offered to pay. "My treat today. You go find us a seat at one of those picnic tables outside."

"Okay. Thank you, Ralph," she said, then headed for the side door leading out to the tables. She found a table with room for them and sat, waiting for him to bring the food. She was thinking about how decisive he had been with the ordering. She chuckled to herself, thinking that Jeff would be more of a girl about ordering than she. They would have stood there for a half hour trying to decide.

Ralph arrived at the table, removing the food from the tray and placing it in front of each of them. He walked over and dropped the tray into a rack near the garbage pails, then returned to the table and sat down across from Charlotte.

"Dig in," he said to her with a grin.

"Oh my God. There is no way I'm going to be able to eat all of this," she moaned.

"You'd better. You're going to need the energy this afternoon. We have a lot of work to do."

Charlotte demurely bit into her sandwich, struggling to stay as neat as possible. In contrast, Ralph took a huge, messy bite of his. After he chewed, he looked at her and chuckled.

"It's barbeque, Charlie. You're supposed to get dirty eating it."

She frowned at him, wiping her mouth with a napkin. "Please don't call me that. I had to listen to that all throughout school. I really don't care for it."

He gave her an evil grin, filing that fact away for future reference. "Hey, at least your name isn't slang for puking. Imagine going through that for your entire life?"

"Did kids make fun of you growing up?" she asked.

"Not to my face. I think they were afraid of me. Kind of how you are afraid of me, you know?"

Charlotte blushed. "I...I'm not afraid of you, Ralph. Wh...why would you say that?" she stammered.

"It's okay. I'm used to it. Sometimes I even like it. It makes people keep their distance."

"Oh," replied Charlotte, looking down. She took another bite of her sandwich, then looked up at him with her big green eyes. He was watching her with interest. "Can you tell me about your horse?"

Ralph paused, popping a couple of the pickle chips into his mouth before answering. "Sir Charles?"

"Is that his name? I like it," Charlotte said with a smile.

"Just don't call him Charlie," Ralph laughed.

Charlotte giggled and rolled her eyes. "I never pegged you for a wiseass."

Ralph shrugged. "My dad bought Sir Charles when I was a kid. He had a good pedigree, and was supposed to be a champion racehorse. That never happened, so he ended up being my pet."

"Did your dad ever buy any other horses?"

"No. My parents died about ten years ago. Car accident."

Charlotte put a hand to her mouth in shock. "I'm so sorry, Ralph. I had no idea."

"Yeah, well. There's a reason I'm stuck with such an illustrious career as a cellar rat."

Charlotte sat there in silence, finishing her lunch and feeling angry with herself. It was quite easy to judge people when you knew nothing about them. She really needed to keep that in mind.

They finished up in relative quiet, as neither felt the urge to break the awkward silence that ensued. Then they headed back to the winery. After a quick trip to the restroom, they met in the foyer and went back down to the cellar together. Ralph checked in with his cellar master, then returned to Charlotte.

"We have a couple jobs this afternoon. We need to move some barrels over to the filtration room, and then take some empties back out and clean them."

"Okay. How do we move them?"

"We move them around with a forklift, but we will have to move some of the empties by hand. C'mon over here and get into the forklift. My turn to drive now."

Charlotte followed Ralph, getting into the cab of the forklift next to him. It was close quarters, and she found herself pressed up against him in the small space. It made her breathe funny as she thought about how rock solid his body felt against hers. Ralph backed up the vehicle, then expertly guided it in front of a rack full of barrels. He guided the forklift into place and fiddled with the mechanism, and a moment later they were moving the rack into the filtration room. They made several trips into the room, and after the last they got out of the forklift to deal with empties.

April was busy showing Jeff how to pump wine from full barrels into the filtration tanks. Once the barrel she had been working on was empty, she asked Jeff to move it to a rack where the empties were being gathered. Jeff was struggling to move the empty barrel, prompting April to nudge him out of the way. "For Christ's sake, put some muscle into it," she snapped. She grabbed hold of the barrel and lifted it up over her head, sliding it into an empty spot on the top of a rack.

Jeff blushed, and looked quite displeased when he saw Ralph snickering at him. Charlotte turned her back to him, bringing a hand to her mouth to conceal a bit of a smile. Ralph effortlessly added a few more empties to the rack, filling it to capacity. He and Charlotte got back into the forklift, capturing the rack full of barrels and moving it over to the cleaning room.

"How much do those barrels weigh?" Charlotte asked him.

"About one hundred twenty pounds when new. Once they've been used, they weigh more because the fluid soaks into the wood."

"There's no way I'll be able to lift those," she said.

"I'll take them down, and I'll show you how to roll them. See those drains in the floor? We want them close to those."

Charlotte nodded her head in understanding. Ralph took several barrels down off the rack, then stood behind Charlotte. Bringing his arms around her, he took her hands and placed them on either side of the rim of the barrel. He tilted the barrel back towards her.

"When you tilt the barrel enough, it will reach a point where it will seem weightless, with each half of the barrel counterbalancing against the other. Do you feel that now?" he asked her, releasing her hands.

"Yes. Wow. It's like it weighs nothing."

Returning his hands to hers, he started to turn the barrel, making it roll. "You move it like this, just rolling it, but you need to move slowly enough to keep it balanced. Understand?"

Charlotte nodded. She was listening and watching, but she was also acutely aware that she could feel his breath on the side of her neck as he spoke. It caused her heart speed up, and made her feel flushed.

Ralph stepped back as the overwhelming urge to taste her neck rose up in him and watched as Charlotte rolled the barrel over to the drain.

"Good. You did really well. Let's get a bunch over there, then we can start to clean them."

Charlotte slowly rolled the barrels as Ralph grabbed them two at a time and carried them over. She couldn't help but notice the muscles in his forearms as he moved the barrels around as if they were empty plastic trash cans. Once they had moved a couple dozen barrels, Ralph picked up some odd looking thing with two hoses attached to it.

"This is what we'll clean the barrels with, Char. We connect this to the top of the barrel, and this hose fills the barrel with hot water. The other hose is the drain hose. See how it is relatively short? We lay this down by one of the drains. Once the barrel is full, we flip this other switch on the pump, and it will allow water to run out of the drain hose into the drain on the floor. We keep the water running until the drain water runs clear. We'll empty the barrel then, and move it to that other rack over there. Got it?"

"Yeah. I'm ready," Charlotte replied with a smile. It wasn't lost on her that Ralph had called her Char. It unsettled her that she didn't mind. In fact, it made her smile inside. He wasn't at all like the man she had pegged him as. The image of her old neighbor flittered through her mind and she wondered how she could have ever thought they were similar.

They worked through the afternoon, once again falling into long awkward silences between Charlotte's questions and Ralphs comments on how she was doing. Ralph was surprised that she had not acted like the princess he thought of her as. By the time they had finished, she had been splashed all over by the dregs of the lees that had lined the dirty barrels. Her diminutive height had not given her the reach of the mostly male cellar rats, and splashes that normally failed to reach even the legs of their jeans had soaked her.

The final straw had been when she had accidently knocked the hose filling the barrel, and it had reared up in an uncompromising arc, hitting her in the face and making her cry out in both shock and dismay. She just stood letting the water rush around her feet, feeling totally out of her depth doing this job. She didn't have the size or strength to be able to manage the equipment.

Ralph held back a chuckle as he picked up the splashing hose and inserted it back into the barrel. "There are some towels over by the lockers," he mumbled, trying to hold back his mirth and nodding his head in the direction of the lockers and adjoining bathrooms. "Go clean up. I'll finish up here. Most of it is done anyway."

She felt so dejected at that point she didn't even considering arguing with him and walked off, her shoes sloshing with the water that had filled them. Taking a greying towel she walked into the bathroom and looked into the mirror, glad that Stuart couldn't see her now. He would definitely not approve of the drowned rat look she had going on. She gave a derisive half laugh. At least she had managed to be a rat of some description. Charlotte removed her shoes and socks, dumping them into the grimy basin. She then stripped off her jeans, trying to ring some of the water from them.

She spent time trying without much success to fix her hair and repair what was left of her makeup so she didn't look quite so bad. Looking at her watch, she realized that the afternoon had gone by and that she had probably delayed Ralph by making the seemingly simple job of cleaning barrels take twice as long as usual. Having done as much as she could, she tried to drag on her wet jeans but found it almost impossible. She went to look for an old lab coat the assistants sometimes left down here in case of spillages and found several in the cupboard beneath the sink. Choosing the larger one, she wrapped it around her half-naked body like a dress and buttoned it up. Discarding the wine stained socks, she slipped on the shoes she would have to throw away once she got home. Leaving the bathroom, she could see April, who had been with Jeff, on the other side of the cellar helping Ralph move the barrels back onto a rack and clean up the area.

"Oh man. I wish I could have seen it," April laughed loudly. She proceeded to speak with a high voice and an affected pose. "I'm meant to be a princess. Seriously I don't do this shit!" then burst out laughing again as Ralph joined her in making fun of Charlotte with his loud chuckle. In that moment all of the good will she had felt towards Ralph throughout the day evaporated and she straightened her back, determined to be pleasant and get this day over and done with quickly.

"We're about done here," Ralph said with a half-smile, noticing her standing there with her jeans and shirt draped over her arm and wearing only a lab coat.

"Good," Charlotte said abruptly, approaching a barrel and attempting to tilt it as Ralph had shown her earlier.

"Leave it," Ralph said, taking the barrel from her. "You did well. I can finish this." Truthfully she was grateful, but she hated that they had been laughing at her and she felt so foolish so she bristled and snapped.

"I'm supposed to work with you," she said with an edge to her voice.

"Actually," Ralph said, clearly confused by the reappearance of her bitchy attitude, "you were supposed to shadow me. So you have done that, you can go now." He turned his back as if dismissing her.

"Tell you what," she said in clipped tones. "I'll leave when you leave, but I will do you a favor and stand over there and check the temperature on the barrels so you and your friends can continue laughing at me. She turned and tried to walk away with some pride, but rather than the heels that would normally click with authority across the floor, her sneakers squelched with every step, making her feel even more foolish.

Ralph was glad he had his back to her as she spoke and she could not see the look of remorse that came over his face as he wondered how much Charlotte had heard of what April had said. In truth, all he had said was that she had gone to clean up, but he had not defended her either when April started do her princess impersonations. He wasn't about to apologize or make excuses. This was the real Charlotte, the bitch he had always known. The girl he had spent the day with was just an aberration, an act, he told himself.

April had left after hearing her words, not wanting to be caught in the middle of trouble during these team building exercises. Charlotte and Ralph proceeded to ignore each other until they were ready to leave. Walking up the stairs in silence once again, Charlotte felt overwhelmed by his huge brooding presence and she walked faster until they hit the foyer.

"Goodbye Ralph," she said stiffly.

"You're not leaving?" Ralph asked equally stiffly.

"I'm just going up to get my things and check on that barrel we had the problem with today. You go, the official day is over now," Charlotte said.

"I'll come. You can blame me for how you look. I don't care," he mumbled. "It shows you actually tried, even though you are obviously far too small to do my job." He watched her as she seemed to bite back an angry retort.

"I made the mistake. It's fine I can handle it. Just go please Ralph," she sighed, obviously exhausted from the day she had. "The day is over. Honestly, I'm just grabbing my stuff and checking the test results. I won't blame you for anything. You have my word."

It was Ralph's turn to bristle. He had said she could blame him; he wasn't fucking worried about it. He was not one to surrender so easily, especially to women. However, he no longer wanted to deal with the bitchy Charlotte that he was so accustomed to, so he shrugged and walked out of the castle. He got into his car and drove to the honky tonk bar. The parking lot was nearly empty, and he walked in and sat down at the bar. Tammy spied him and came over with a big smile.

"You're early, Ralph. You must have had a hell of a day."

"Give the woman a prize," grumbled Ralph. "How about a burger and some fries, Tam. I'm hungry as hell. Make the burger a double with bacon, Okay?"

"Sure, sugar," Tammy replied with a smile. She poured him a beer and placed it in front of him, then went through a swinging door leading into the kitchen to give his order to the cook.

Like many roadside joints, the bar had a limited menu. Ralph would come in for dinner once a week or so, which is how he got to know Tammy. Once the place got busy, there was no time for small talk. Ralph took a pull of his beer, then turned and watched the evening's band set up on the small stage on one side of the room. Needing to pee, he got up from the barstool and walked over to the bathroom, stepping through the small door and going inside.

Charlotte turned off her car and sat there a moment, the humiliation of the latter part of the day consuming her. Holding back her sobs, she opened the car door and stepped out into the dusty parking lot. She was relieved that Jeff had whined that he was too exhausted to come over tonight. She really just wanted to be alone. Feeling fortunate that she had a bag of old clothes in her trunk that she was going to donate, she had changed into something dry and clean. The Salvation Army could wait another few days, she told herself. Locking her car, she walked over to the door of the building and walked inside.

The place was nearly empty, which shocked Charlotte. She had never seen it like this before, but then, she had never been here this early before either. She marched right up to the bar and sat down at a stool. Tammy walked over and smiled. "What'll you have," she asked.

"Hi. I'd like a vodka and soda with a twist of lime please," replied Charlotte. With the day she'd had, she needed a drink. She was really beginning to see Ralph in a new light, and then he had let his true colors show. She was angry with herself for letting her guard down.

Tammy turned and placed the drink in front of her. "Here you go Hon," she said. "You want to start a tab?"

"Thanks. No tab," Charlotte replied, handing Tammy a twenty. She turned to watch the band setting up as Tammy placed her change on the bar.

Ralph barely noticed the woman sitting at the bar with her back to him when he came out of the bathroom. He settled back onto his barstool, waving at Tammy for another beer. She poured him another, then went into the kitchen, returning with his food. She placed it in front of him along with a napkin and a bottle of ketchup.

"You wanna talk about it, Ralph?"

"No. I just want to forget it," he replied with his deep voice, taking a bite of his burger.

Charlotte's eyes went wide as she recognized the voice behind her. She slowly turned on the stool and faced the bar, glancing in his direction. Ralph sensed her gaze and turned, catching her green eyes with his. He gave her a little nod and went back to his burger.

Charlotte blushed and fumed at the same time. All she wanted was a drink. Did she really have to be subjected to him again? She decided that she was going to stand her ground and not rush out of the bar. She wouldn't give him the satisfaction. She sipped her drink, trying to look calm and relaxed.